finished essay

wright-application/stem-essay/main.tex

@@ -50,10 +50,11 @@
 
 \begin{document}
 
+\begin{center}
+	\textbf{\large Wright Scholar Essay (Topics 1 and 3)}
+\end{center}
 
-\noindent\textbf{Topic 3:} Research involves trying new things. Please give an example of when you stepped out of your comfort zone to experience something new in regards to science or engineering.
 
-\noindent\textbf{Topic 4:} What do you hope to get out of the Wright Scholar experience (be creative)?
 
 \vspace{12pt}
 
@@ -70,25 +71,42 @@ In two minutes and thirty seconds, we became league champions.
 
 It was almost hard to believe that seven months back, I didn't know what a variable was.
 I was fully into music, and programming was not even an afterthought.
-It was mere coincidence that my neighbor (and good friend) decided to start a robotics team, and given the minimal investment, I
+It was a mere coincidence that my neighbor (and good friend) decided to start a robotics team, and given the minimal investment, I
 joined. Like nearly all of my endeavors, my FTC journey began with a Google search. I was learning at a snail's pace, and it
 had taken me two months to simply make a motor move. Soon, I was hooked. Like a sponge, I was absorbing everything I had to learn,
 and I had eventually taught myself enough Java to become a functional FTC programmer.
 
 As the season progressed, my sponge was
 soaked, and we were a top competitive team by February. On competition day, the lightbulb within me finally clicked.
-The joy I experienced wasn't just from our robot picking up and scoring pixels, but from the fact that code I had recently learn to write
-was resulting in a tangible output that I could witness. It was that moment where I decided to pursue a STEM career. I was
-no longer just a high school student, I was a STEM student, and I was ready to help change the world.
+The joy I experienced wasn't just from our robot picking up and scoring pixels, but from the fact that the code I had recently learn to write
+was resulting in a tangible output that I could witness. It was that moment when I decided to pursue a STEM career. I was
+no longer just a high school student; I was a STEM student, and I was ready to help change the world.
 
 But that readiness was tested in September 2024. In a spur of ambitious insanity,
 I had committed to building a machine learning model to predict gait patterns in Parkinson's Disease for my sophomore-year
 Science Fair project. The problem: I had no clue how to. And so I learned. Python syntax, NumPy arrays, signal filtering,
-feature extraction, model architectures. I had entered a brand new domain, and each concept seemed to confuse me in a different way.
+feature extraction, and model architectures. I had entered a brand new domain, and each concept seemed to confuse me in a different way.
 After two months of painfully laborious learning, coding, and debugging, I was finally able to transform raw sensor data into a
 functional and accurate classification model. Somewhere between the first error message and the final 96\% accuracy, I
 had managed to absorb a new discipline by pushing myself into unfamiliar waters.
 
+If it weren't for my ambition, I would have stopped there. Unfortunately, I realized that a working model on my laptop
+wasn't going to help any Parkinson's patients, and I needed to embed my model into a complete hardware device. This
+task was beyond daunting, as I had to venture into the foreign land of hardware and electrical engineering. With my
+engineering teacher guiding me, I slowly learned everything I needed. After dozens of 2 AM KiCAD tutorial binge sessions,
+I finally had a working
+design for a fully custom printed circuit board (PCB). Two weeks later, my PCB arrived, and after soldering all my
+components, it didn't work. My heart sank. I touched up all the joints with my soldering iron and tried again. Success.
+I wrote some quick software in C++, and I finally had a working end-to-end implementation for my final solution. After
+my project made it to the International Science and Engineering Fair (ISEF), the judges were impressed by the full
+end-to-end implementation, and my efforts were finally rewarded when I won 3rd in Robotics and Intelligent Machines at ISEF.
+
+Throughout my high-school life, I have strived to constantly learn new things, which is why I am so excited about the
+Wright Scholar opportunity. From tinkering in my bed, I can start working on relevant research problems this Summer,
+which would exponentially increase my learning and comprehension of these subjects. From cutting-edge
+biomedical computing to sensor processing to cybersecurity, AFRL offers exciting venues for me to apply my knowledge.
+For a sponge who lives to learn, AFRL can serve as a reservoir of knowledge, and I can't wait to absorb new information with
+domain experts.
 
 
 \end{document}